Nook version of War and Peace turns the word “kindled” into “Nookd”

Tolstoy's text victimized by modern technology, laziness.

In one of the truly bizarre incidents we've seen out of the e-book publishing world, a translation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace for Barnes & Noble's Nook platform has replaced all mentions of the word "kindled" with "Nookd."

It appears to be a case of Ctrl-F gone wrong. An astute reader named Philip broke the story on his blog, noting that his reading of the classic was interrupted by the sentence "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern…" The blogger noticed more and more uses of the word "Nookd," leading him to examine a paper copy to find a more accurate translation that used the word "kindled" instead.

The best explanation, we think, comes from a commenter on the blog, who says "This obviously wasn't done by Barnes & Noble, but by the publisher who submitted the book to Barnes & Noble. They created a Kindle version of this public domain book first, realized they used 'Kindle' somewhere in their submission, and did a quick find-and-replace to change 'Kindle' to 'Nook'—never once thinking it would affect the book's text rather than just whatever they put in the title page."

Another blog post by Jonathan Zittrain, author of "The Future of the Internet and how to stop it," and Berkman Center research associate Kendra Albert, comes to a similar conclusion, noting that the "Nookd" version of War and Peace comes from a company called Superior Formatting Publishing.

We found eight mentions of the word "nookd" after downloading the e-book, as you can see here:

While we hate to see the text of a great writer like Tolstoy sullied by such silliness, at least it wasn't intentional (unlike that little incident involving the Amazon Kindle and George Orwell's 1984).

Not really anything new here, except that modern technology makes this particular mistake not only fixable but the fix easily distributed to the owners of the e-book. Typesetting and editing mistakes abounded in the publishing industry long before e-books, unfortunately A few years ago, I bought an expensive and beautiful hardbound set of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin novels only to find editing mistakes throughout, the most irritating of which was the replacement of 'HMS Java' with 'HMS Fava' repeatedly. This mistake will be there forever.

It seems odd, you'd think most of the text replacements would actually be legitimate for older books. And why are they censoring anway?With today's technology it seems a bit absurd to do this, or at least proof it. Its not like they're looking in every kindle and cranny of every novel manually

I think I read that verson. It seemed like the translation was a bit off...

"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of Barnes and Noble(tm). But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by Jeff Bezos - I really believe he is Antichrist - I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer the 'King of the eBook Readers'' as Gizmodo(tm) calls you! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you- sit down and tell me all the news about the full featured NOOK(tm) SimpleTouch(tm) with the patented GlowLight(tm), perfect for beftime reading."

This absolute travesty aside, as much as $0.99 is a reasonable price for an immaterial collection of bits that costs money just to store a copy of, it's still too much for a public domain work you can get for free from Project Gutenberg.

To say nothing of the completely separate absolute travesty that is $10 ebooks!

Stuff like this makes you want to call BS every time someone says that printing physical books and creating an ebook (from an author's text) are comparable in price and that ebooks should be more expensive than paperbacks which you can resell and lend out.

I still don't see the point to an ebook reader. Real books are so much better. Except for tech books for searching.

2000 books: wall of shelving, or small USB flash memory drive?Going on a trip? Choose which paperbacks to stuff into your bag, or take them all?Ooh, there was that one passage in this book about _____? I can't remember exactly... Well, probably Google would suffice, but again, ebook.Bookmarks? Ebooks, but not yet by as large a margin as they should be.Arm strain? 600 page hardcover, or lightweight ereader?Lending out? Paper books, unfortunately, but maybe changing.Resale value? Paper books entirelyWater resistance? Dubious for both, but ebooks are easier to back upPower outage for a month? Paper booksAuthor autographs? Paper books (for now, and certainly tougher to ever sell the ebook on eBay)Use in squishing bugs? Paper booksSpecial editions with gold leaf trim and squishy soft covers? Paper booksMake your own corrections? EbooksHighlighting, word lookups, copy and paste? EbooksGlorious color inserts? Paper books (mostly)

My transition is slow, but I'll take ebooks 95 times out of a hundred, and suffer waiting for the 5 remaining cases. The mistake in the article was amusing; the level of professionalism in ebook editing is all over the map.

I still don't see the point to an ebook reader. Real books are so much better. Except for tech books for searching.

2000 books: wall of shelving, or small USB flash memory drive?Going on a trip? Choose which paperbacks to stuff into your bag, or take them all?Ooh, there was that one passage in this book about _____? I can't remember exactly... Well, probably Google would suffice, but again, ebook.Bookmarks? Ebooks, but not yet by as large a margin as they should be.Arm strain? 600 page hardcover, or lightweight ereader?Lending out? Paper books, unfortunately, but maybe changing.Resale value? Paper books entirelyWater resistance? Dubious for both, but ebooks are easier to back upPower outage for a month? Paper booksAuthor autographs? Paper books (for now, and certainly tougher to ever sell the ebook on eBay)Use in squishing bugs? Paper booksSpecial editions with gold leaf trim and squishy soft covers? Paper booksMake your own corrections? EbooksHighlighting, word lookups, copy and paste? EbooksGlorious color inserts? Paper books (mostly)

My transition is slow, but I'll take ebooks 95 times out of a hundred, and suffer waiting for the 5 remaining cases. The mistake in the article was amusing; the level of professionalism in ebook editing is all over the map.

Agreed

just read Anna Karenina and I marked it up a lot with notes, and it was much more pleasant on the iPad then my experience a couple summers ago with War and Peace (lighter too

just read Anna Karenina and I marked it up a lot with notes, and it was much more pleasant on the iPad then my experience a couple summers ago with War and Peace (lighter too

I'm glad someone thinks that book is pleasant. I could barely slog through it. Anna started out as a sympathetic character, but by the end, I was thinking

Spoiler: show

"Yes! Please jump in front of that train!" I couldn't wait for her to off herself just to stop all the whining and self-pity.

Lol

Well i thought the story about Levin and Kitty was the real star of the show. At the end of the book I disliked Vronsky (felt very detached) and hated Anna. The strangest character was Karenin. He was never really likable, yet sympathetic nonetheless. Good read though, not as good as War and Peace but worth the 3 bucks on iBooks.....

just read Anna Karenina and I marked it up a lot with notes, and it was much more pleasant on the iPad then my experience a couple summers ago with War and Peace (lighter too

I'm glad someone thinks that book is pleasant. I could barely slog through it. Anna started out as a sympathetic character, but by the end, I was thinking

Spoiler: show

"Yes! Please jump in front of that train!" I couldn't wait for her to off herself just to stop all the whining and self-pity.

Lol

Well i thought the story about Levin and Kitty was the real star of the show. At the end of the book I disliked Vronsky (felt very detached) and hated Anna. The strangest character was Karenin. He was never really likable, yet sympathetic nonetheless. Good read though, not as good as War and Peace but worth the 3 bucks on iBooks.....

btw, just got The Cossacks, a short read by Tolstoy standards.... Going to give that a try this upcoming week.....

I still don't see the point to an ebook reader. Real books are so much better. Except for tech books for searching.

2000 books: wall of shelving, or small USB flash memory drive?

if books does not have DRM

cos_1 wrote:

Going on a trip? Choose which paperbacks to stuff into your bag, or take them all?

right. but was it Ars where I read research about how much books people read per year?it's not that big number

cos_1 wrote:

Ooh, there was that one passage in this book about _____? I can't remember exactly... Well, probably Google would suffice, but again, ebook.Bookmarks? Ebooks, but not yet by as large a margin as they should be.

I still don't see the point to an ebook reader. Real books are so much better. Except for tech books for searching.

2000 books: wall of shelving, or small USB flash memory drive?

if books does not have DRM

cos_1 wrote:

Going on a trip? Choose which paperbacks to stuff into your bag, or take them all?

right. but was it Ars where I read research about how much books people read per year?it's not that big number

cos_1 wrote:

Ooh, there was that one passage in this book about _____? I can't remember exactly... Well, probably Google would suffice, but again, ebook.Bookmarks? Ebooks, but not yet by as large a margin as they should be.

well, I have some of books I bought from closed-circle.net and some are given by one of them.And if I _ever_ want to buy something from those authors - I will buy from them

cos_1 wrote:

Make your own corrections? Ebooks

again, assuming DRM is removed

cos_1 wrote:

Highlighting, word lookups, copy and paste? Ebooks

not always. And sometimes formally works but unusable. Mostly due to DRM again

I'm too lazy to go point by point and fix the formatting, so:You can still have the books in the flash drive even with DRM. If you don't read much, you don't need to worry about paper books either. That's why I said bookmarks not by as large a margin as they should be, making and getting to them should be very simple and convenient.I have DRMed ebooks on my computer and ereader and could have them on my phone. I could copy them elsewhere without stripping DRM. I couldn't read them, necessarily, but I could copy them.Lynn Abbey and CJ I know at least. Thanks for the link. Paper still has the advantage as a valuable or heirloom, that ebooks can't and likely won't for ages. Power outage you could have a hand crank charger, but I was making the point that power is a slight disadvantage for ereaders, but it would take a long outage to seriously render the dedicated ereaders useless, unlike the LCD-based ones.Touchscreens and DRM-free are becoming more common, but improvements are needed for sure.